Red Velvet Birthday Cake

Red velvet cake is a type of rich and sweet cake with a distinctive dark red to bright red or red-brown color. It is most popular in the Southern United States. The most typical frosting for a red velvet cake is a butter roux icing also known as a cooked flour frosting but cream cheese buttercream frosting are popular too.

I've been meaning to try this cake for quite sometime, I'm mighty curious with that red color and the butter roux icing. I haven't heard and tried that before this. It's my birthday so I get to try any cake I want, and this is the cake I chose. Buttermilk is not readily available in Manila, however there's a powdered buttermilk available, I wanted to give it a try. It's weird though the powdered buttermilk smelled like ordinary milk, so I'm not sure if I was ripped off or that's how it's suppose to be, I still persevered.

This red velvet cake takes TWO bottles of red food coloring, it's messy stuff after everything is mixed everything is RED! Even after baking look at my serving platter, its red! I don't know its psychological or what but when I was preparing the ingredients for this cake, I thought that the red food coloring smells like blood! Eeek! Maybe I watch too much True Blood, hahahaha...

Its such a easy batter everything comes smoothly. What intrigued me more in this particular recipe, is that the last step is mixing bicarb with vinegar, then mix it to the cake batter. Of course, the bicarb reacted with the vinegar and I thought that was cool! Yeah yeah...I'm kinda a geek too! The book says it would make 3 layers of cake, but I find it utterly impossible. I barely was able to make it into 2 layers let alone three. I think I really should have made it into 3 layers as you can see I had too much icing on top of my cake! Next time I make this cake, I will really try to make it into 3 layers.

The butter roux icing is something I've never tried before so I was excited to do so. It was actually quite easy making the icing. Although it only confirmed what I've always known which is that I really really do NOT like buttercream icing, i find it too rich and buttery. I know I'm just weird that way. All in all, the experience in making this cake is not bad a lot of first time experiences which was fun.

nikcreate

I'm a nine to five pencil pusher who loves to play with flour and paper during my free time. Dreams of going to Europe and eat croissants and make pastries all day long!

Your velvet cake looks so yummy!! I made a red velvet cake last weekend and used this recipe http://www.howcast.com/videos/139827-How-To-Make-Red-Velvet-Cake. I didn't use buttermilk however and it turned out fine. I also mixed the beet juice with the food coloring because I was a little scared of the amount of food coloring the recipe asked for.

Looks like a great first red velvet cake! I'm partial to the cream cheese frosting when I make this cake, so I'll have to try that buttermilk roux sometime.Sometimes if I'm out of buttermilk, I just sour some regular milk with a bit of lemon juice or vinegar. Use about a Tablespoon of either and then enough milk to make a cup, stir and let stand 5 minutes before using.